Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

Diana K. Davis

Publication Year: 2011

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

The modernist fables that underlie the developmentalist states of the Middle
East and North Africa (MENA) have only recently begun to attract the attention
of scholars in their own right. As French and British colonial fantasies
of recovering the supposed agricultural productivity of Roman North
Africa ...

Acknowledgments

Many debts are incurred during a collaborative project such as this. First
and foremost, we would like to thank the contributors to the volume and
Timothy Mitchell for writing the afterword. They are all exceedingly insightful,
innovative, and accomplished scholars with whom it has been a
genuine pleasure to work. ...

Introduction: Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East: History, Policy, Power, and Practice

Representations of the Middle East nearly inevitably include desolate
scenes of empty and parched deserts, punctuated, perhaps, with a
lonely string of camels, a verdant but isolated oasis, or a beach with large
dunes of golden sand, sometimes with a pyramid, an oil derrick, or a minaret
in the background. ...

Chapter 1: “A Rebellion of Technology”: Development, Policing, and the British Arabian Imaginary

We have inherited two contrasting images of Iraq. It is, on the one hand,
the fertile crescent, the everlastingly prolific river valley, the very cradle of
civilization; and, on the other, the archetypal wasteland, a barren desert
of glaring sun and bleak horizons testifying at once to man’s and nature’s
cruelty, ...

Chapter 2: Restoring Roman Nature: French Identity and North African Environmental History

French colonial occupation and expansion across North Africa
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were closely connected with a
widespread belief that the French were the heirs of Rome. Although the
importance of the Roman legacy for several French colonial actions has
been recognized, for example in the military, ...

Chapter 3: Body of Work: Water and Reimagining the Sahara in the Era of Decolonization

“If you knew the secrets of the desert, you would think like me; but you
are ignorant of them, and ignorance is the mother of evil.”1 This supremely
confident boast, attributed apocryphally to the celebrated Algerian intellectual,
poet, and resistance leader, the Emir 'Abd al-Qâdir, illuminates the
centrality ...

Chapter 4: From the Bottom Up: The Nile, Silt, and Humans in Ottoman Egypt

The Nile Delta and the Mediterranean have been pushing against each
other for the past 10 million years since the river first began carrying dirt
to the sea.1 For most of the last 7,500 years though, the Delta has enjoyed
the upper hand. As the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek traveler and historian
Herodotus sailed toward ...

Chapter 5: Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt: The 1902 Aswan Dam, Historical Imagination, and the Production of Agricultural Geography

In December 1902, with much pomp and circumstance, Egypt’s British
and Egyptian elite celebrated the completion of the first Aswan dam.
The 1902 Aswan dam (Khazan Aswan) represented a dramatic new foray in
the colonial government’s ability to manipulate the physical environment
and allocate its most valuable resource. ...

Chapter 6: Remapping the Nation,Critiquing the State: Environmental Narratives and Desert Land Reclamation in Egypt

In 1998, the Mubarak regime announced that it would build the largest
water-pumping station in the world, taking Nile water from behind the
Aswan High Dam reservoir to irrigate portions of the southwestern desert.
The government declared it would convert millions of acres from desert
to arable land, transforming ...

Several thousand years after salinization led to the abandonment of
irrigated agriculture among the early settlements of upper Mesopotamia,
irrigation is emerging anew.1 With a host of technologies now available,
and careful monitoring of soil and water conditions, planners and scientists
are hopeful that a similar fate ...

Chapter 8: Hydro-Imaginaries and the Construction of the Political Geography of the Jordan River: The Johnston Mission, 1953–56

Shortly after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, disputes
over unilateral plans for utilizing the Jordan River and its tributaries
erupted between Israel and the riparian Arab states of Jordan, Lebanon,
and Syria. Conflict became especially intense between Syria and Israel when
the latter began construction ...

There are many different ways to think about environmentalism; it can
be examined sociologically, politically, scientifically, and so on. Perhaps the
most common themes in relation to Palestinian and Israeli environmental
issues have to do with the overarching question of power and ideology,1
and to a lesser extent ...

Afterward: Are Environmental Imaginaries Culturally Constructed?

The modern history of the Middle East has always been the history of a
human relationship with nature. The environment appears to define the Arab-Islamic world more than it does any other major region in world history. It is
time to ask, as this book does, how this naturalized history came about. ...

Contributors

Samer Alatout is an associate professor in the Department of Community
and Environmental Sociology, the Nelson Institute for Environmental
Studies, the Graduate Program of Sociology, and the Department of
Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also affiliated
with the Holtz Center for Science ...

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